/Archival: The Perils of Power - speech at the Carnagie Innovation Center, by Ganesh Prayagraj

"If a prey animal kills a predator animal even 1% of the time, the predator will go extinct.

"That is not strictly speaking accurate. The ratio is sometimes better for the predator, but sometimes much worse - it depends on reproductive cycles. It takes over two years for an adult tiger to manufacture two more adult tigers, for example. Over that same interval, that tiger needs to kill 100 prey animals. And to be sure, that tiger is fearsome; it has single-handedly slain 100 times its number in single combat without taking so much as a scratch. But if even one of those 100 deer turns his head and gores the tiger then the predator population will be in a state of slow decline."

"Predators know this. They hunt the weak, the sick and the small. They hunt from stealth and with overwhelming force. If a true predator has decided to kill your company then you will either not notice it happening or be powerless to stop it. The only way to avoid this is to avoid the scent of weakness - and this means that to survive, you must pay attention to the self above all. You must refine your spirit, practice discipline, stand proud and tall, put on a show even when it feels like nobody is watching. You cannot see the tigers, but the tigers can see you, and so you are the one required to perform."

*

The Angel of the Harvest does not perform. 

She has in hand a miniature whiteboard and a thin sliver of graphite, held with preternatural gentleness through white rubber gloves. It is an ugly compromise - all the ink dried out centuries ago, and while the pencils survived longer eventually they rotted away until they were just slivers of inorganic graphite in the midst of a dust smear of wood rot. Graphite does not bond well to the plastic surface of the whiteboard, but it does leave enough of a trace for basic note-taking and sketching. And that is just what the immortal machine does; circling the colossus slowly, observing slope and structure, taking notes as to the intervals between mudslides, the cyclical angles of bending knee and falling seeds, calculating angles, angels and predators. 

Doing something as an act of spontaneous joy is not incompatible with gathering detailed notes beforehand.

It notes too, though with less interest, the movement patterns of the marauders. Do they seek to injure the beast again? Can it calculate a trajectory they are sending it along? Do they patrol, do they try to climb the giant, do they have a garrison up above or means of easily scaling or influencing the creature? Despite the minute scratches it makes on the whiteboard the Angel soon fills the entire board with notes before sealing it in a clear plastic bag and producing another. Through ash-darkened binoculars, it allows itself the luxury of scanning to see if the art of paper making had survived into this strange future.